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Automatically delete files in Document Library after X days

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

Hi,

How can i create a flow so that everytime a file is created/added in a SharePoint Document Library, that the particular file than will be deleted in lets say in "7 days".

The point is that the no files older than 7 days will stay in the Document Library.

Thanks...

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gamoraes 1,040 on at

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Hi @Anonymous, first of all thanks for post.

i think the best way to do this is using a schedule to get all documents, look at example below:

Detaileds Steps:

1 - Use an schedule trigger with 1 day interval
2 - Use the action - SharePoint - Get file properties only
  Put your Site and Document Libary name
3- Use an foreach and put values as result
4- Use an advanced condiction to verify if the actual date is greater than document created date + 7
  This is the condiction code, in red are the days to add, change if you need:

@greater(utcNow('yyyyMMdd'), formatDateTime(adddays(item()?['Created'],7),'yyyyMMdd'))

5- If the condiction is yes, the document is older than 7 days
6- Use the action - SharePoint - Delete Item

Hope this helps.

Best Regards,

Gustavo Moraes

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi Gustavo,

Thank you very much for your reply. I will try this out later
What if you want to change from 7 days to lets say 60 minutes?

Thanks again

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gamoraes 1,040 on at

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Simple change adddays to addminutes, you can use other functions, to see docs look here inside Date Functions

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v-xida-msft Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @adamk,

I agree with @gamoraes’s thought, I have made a test on my side and the flow works well.

The flow works successfully as below:

If you have any further questions, please feel free to reply me here.

Bets regards,

Kris

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ThomasAzar 2 on at

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For the flow when you get to the Action for "SharePoint - Delete Items " It is asking me for the list and for the id. Am I doing something wrong? I am wanting to auto delete all files older than 21 days that were added to the Documents folder.

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freder1ck 8 on at

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@ThomasAzar,
I had a similar issue.

First, I created a new library in the workspace just for auto deletion.

Delete Item did not work for me. Instead, I had to use Sharepoint: Delete File action.

There are two fields for this action:
Site Address: (name of the workspace group)
File Identifier: (dynamic field called Identifier. Identifier contains both the Library name AND the actual file name for each file.
Fred

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @gamoraes,

In your condition statement, @greater(utcNow('yyyyMMdd'), formatDateTime(adddays(item()?['Created'],1),'yyyyMMdd')) - is the "utcNow" telling MS Flow to look for the # of specified days based on when the file was created in SharePoint?

In my particular case, I'm not actually creating a new file within SharePoint, but rather creating a word doc on my computer, then uploading it into SharePoint documents library. Will your condition statement treat the file in the same way as the upload date/time being the same as created date/time? I hope my question makes sense.

Thanks!

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @v-xida-msft,

I also created this same flow and followed the instructions given, yet my flow fails every time. I'm not sure where I'm going wrong, any assistance would be appreciated!

Aso, would you please tell me if my understanding of this particular flow is correct?

Interval - 1 Day : This flow will "trigger" every day or once a day
Condition - Each time this flow is triggered, it is going to check if the designated file (based on filename) is older than X number of days, in this case, older than 1 day.

Thank you!!

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gamoraes 1,040 on at

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HI @Anonymous.

I'll do an example for you.

Regards,

Gustavo Moraes

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MarinaDS 2 on at

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Is there any way to do this for a specific OneDrive folder? I'd like to have a flow where my Downloads folder in OneDrive automatically deletes content older than a week.

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